Simplified Readability Metrics

This paper describes a new approach to measuring the complexity of software systemswith considering their readability. Readability Metrics were first proposed by Chungand Yung 181 in 1990. Software industry uses software metrics to measure thecomplexity of software systems for software cost estimation, software developmentcontrol, software assurance, software testing, and software maintenance [3], [71, [9], 151,[18]. Most of the software metrics measure the software complexity by one or more ofthe software attributes. We usually class@ the software attributes that software metricsuse for measuring complexity into three categories: size, control flow, and data flow [5],f71. All the three categories concern with the physical activities of softwaredevelopment. Readability Metrics have been outstanding among the existing softwarecomplexity metrics for taking nonphysical software attributes, like readability, intoconsiderations [8]. The applications of Readability Metrics are good in indicating theadditional efforts required for less readable software systems, and help in keeping thesoftware systems maintainable. However, the numerous metrics and the complicatedformulas in the family usually make it tedious to apply Readability Metrics to largescale software systems. In this paper, we propose a simplified approach to ReadabilityMetrics. We reduce the number of required measures and keep the considerations onsoftware readability. We introduce our Readability model in a more formal way. TheReadability Metrics preprocesses algorithm is developed with compilers front-endtechniques. The experiment results show that this simplified approach has goodpredictive power in measuring software complexity with software readability, inaddition to its ease of applying. The applications of Readability Metrics indicate thereadability of software systems and help in keeping the source code readable andmaintainable.